This morning I tried to download photos from my camera to my external hard drive, and I heard a funny thumping / clicking sound. The wheel spun and spun, but nothing was copied. Unplugging, plugging, rescanning, etc. doesn't work and it shows up as uninitialised (on my mac) - looks like it's dead.

Earlier this year I moved all my photos from my internal HDD onto this external HDD. Thank goodness I'm backing it up to a 2nd external HDD with time machine (mac) and I also copy all my photos to a second portable HDD which I use as a second backup / take with me / offsite backup.

I must admit that I've been very fortunate thus far, and that this is the first time ever that a hard drive has failed on me. I have not been as diligent in the past, and only started to take backups seriously maybe 2 or 3 years back - but now that I've actually experienced a failure, I can breathe a sigh of relief.

How about you? Have you had any backup / hard drive failure stories to tell?

I've lost one drive that wasn't backed up; it was an external drive that I'd retired, and it never came back when I needed it again. It was all older and unimportant material at that point, so it was not a huge loss, but I still would have liked to have some of the photos from it.

All of my media files (photos, audio, music) lives on a Drobo raid array, which is an upgrade from a Western Digital raid that was always problematic. I also back up all of my raw files to a second HDD when I import them into Lightroom: once that drive is full, it goes in the filing cabinet and I start on another one. It would be a massive hassle to actually recreate the finished images from the bulky raw material, but that's my safety net.

The other time I've lost images wasn't because of drive failure, but was a mistake that I made migrating images from an old drive to a new one. I thought I had copied some photos that I hadn't; I'm not sure quite how it happened, but that's the 'mistake' part of it. I've heard that this is a more common source of data loss than drive failure, but it's harder to find people who have suffered from it.

My other backup strategy is to 'roll forward' my favourite (3-star and up) images from one annual lightroom catalog to the next, and they're all exported to a separate external drive that also holds the backup of my computer's internal hard drive, which is where all of my applications and lightroom catalogs are stored. As my 'in case of fire' drive, this is one of the LaCie Rugged portables that can be used without A/C power should I need to relocate my office to the local Kinko's. I've never had to use it, and I've also never tested to see if it would work, which is another weakness should a failure happen.

I also try to use my 160GB iPod as a portable backup drive for my 3+ photos, but I'm pretty delinquent when it comes to keeping it updated.

In six years I have had three hard drive crashes. I use a combination of internal hard drives, external hard drives, DVD's and a Drobo for my back-ups. I currently have around 6TB of image files I have to maintain and keep backed up. This grows at about a rate of 50GB per wedding.